>The EU has lots of faults but not as bad as the US govt with their
>idea of policing the world and .. Anyway this list could do without
>extreme political nonsense." ~ Michael

@ Since you are a supporter of Kyoto, I'll be glad to dub you as this
list's official expert on what constitutes "extremes" .. that is, if
the other supporters of it here, won't feel jealous.

A quintessential "extreme political nonsense" case in point:

"French President Jacques Chirac - who in 2000 said Kyoto represents
"the first component of an authentic global governance", provided the
key clue as to why so many in the international community still
revere the Kyoto Protocol." .." ~ Klein Verzet - A small voice in
the cacophony, a little finger in an increasingly soggy dyke.
http://tinyurl.com/yszk8v

His central thesis is that in the last decades national governments,
especially in Europe, have replaced their professed loyalty for their
constituents for a loyalty that "is pledged to the international
elite that increasingly supersedes national interests." That wouldn't
be so bad, were it not for the fact that governments the West over
have adopted a fully secular humanist and even post-modernist view of law:
Without God laws are arbitrary and can fall prey either to evil
design or ill-conceived political expediency, which is another way of
saying that without God law is tyranny.
Funny you should say that, the writer mused. In the last couple of
days Gagdad Bob of One Cosmos shed his light on the convergence of
secular 'progressive' and islamist doctrine, noting the onvergence
and trying to explain why two seemingly diametrically opposed systems
of thought would find support with each other. The two pieces,
<http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/11/progressive-thought-and-denial-of.html>Progressive
Thought and the Denial of History and
<http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/12/driving-truck-bombs-through-gaps-in.html>Driving
Truck Bombs Through the Gaps in Leftist Logic both make basically the
same point as does Alexander Boot: Western culture owes it succes to
a philosophy in which the horizontal (the material, the wordly)
intersected and interacted with the ertical (the transcedental, the mystical).

The whole idea of science for instance is in principle a deeply
religious, christian notion: God created the universe and gave it
laws to obey. These laws are knowable, because God does not willfully
revoke or repeal laws he himself instated (he's God, right? So He
should be able to get it right the first try, doesn't He?). Secular
humanist progressives deny God, therefor (theoretically) eliminating
the basis of the scientific method (if there's no God, there's no
truth and so everything is a social construct. This is pretty much
post-modernism, were it not for the fact that somehow testing the
social construct of gravity from a twentieth story window yields the
same, dialectically undesirable, result). As
<http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/12/driving-truck-bombs-through-gaps-in.html>Gagdad
Bob cites:
The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes
leftism in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless
contempt for traditional moral values (the vertical) with an
unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection (which amounts to a
coerced "horizontal verticality"). The first step in this process is
a complete skepticism that rejects traditional ideals of moral
authority and transcendent moral obligation -- a complete
materialistic skepticism combined with a boundless, utopian moral
fervor to horizontally transform mankind.
Islam on the other hand, totally denies the horizontal. With regard
to the central notion in philosophy, science and Western thinking in
general, the notion of cause and effect,
<http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/12/what_islamic_science_and_philo.html>Islam
is devastatingly clear:
Causes and effects are inadmissible, according to al-Ghazali, because
causes limit the absolute freedom of Allah to bring about whatever
events he wills. Effects are brought about, not by causes, but by the
direct will of Allah.
Thus the material interaction between causes and effects is
completely eliminated, substituted by divine whim. The apple falls
from the tree not because of gravity, but because of Allah. And if
Allah got up on the wrong side of the bed, it is perfectly normal to
expect the apple to fall upwards, for Allah is Allah and Allah
doesn't give a shit for any laws he may have constructed. Everything
we see happening around us, as mundane as billiard balls clicking and
bumping in predictable manner is mystical, divinely effected, vertical.

The curious thing is the convergence between the Left and Islam, when
the one denies completely the existence of the doctrinal dimension of
the other. But the convergence happens, because both have problems
reconciling their preferred mode of thinking with the practicalities
of the real world. Gagdad Bob again:
But at the foundation of the secular leftist revolt against the
vertical is the attendant, deeply irrational idea that there is no
such thing as absolute truth, for God, among other things, is the
ground and possibility of Truth. The death of God brings with it the
death of the living Word, or logos. The official name of this death
of the Word is "deconstruction," although it is really more of a
murder (or perhaps suicide), with murderous consequences. For if
truth is relative and perception is reality, then no one's ideas
about the world are any better than anyone else's -- including
Islamists. And this creates a gaping cognitive and spiritual chasm
big enough to drive a truck bomb through.
Between Leftism and Islam we stand to lose a uniquely effective way
of exploring the world around us.
Put it this way: the scientific revolution occurred just once, in
just one civilization -- something like 99.98 percent of all
scientific inventions and discoveries have occurred in Western
Christendom. Everywhere else, science either never appeared, or it
petered out after some initial advances -- for example, in China and
the Islamic world. And the reason science could not be sustained in
these civilizations is specifically religious.
We should be very careful not to lose this precious gift. But there's
good news to be had in this. There's nothing like a crisis to focus
the mind. It seems to me that the American Thinker piece, the two
posts at One Cosmos and the latest Fjordman piece are part of the
same process: Slowly we are starting to narrow down what it is that
makes the West unique and yes: superior to other civilizations. We
are starting to be in a position to argue coherently why
multiculturalism, or cultural relativism, is akin to selling out the
principles that brought the west it's prosperity and sophistication.
We are starting to get our defense together.

And if we succeed then maybe, just maybe, not all is lost. Maybe in
time we will be in a position to confidently go on the offensive,
defeating multiculturalism and islamism with the one ideological WMD
the Western world has held for more then three centuries, but has
forgotten how to deploy: Rational thought.

~ Janice ...... describing what some would call the fallacious nature
of the Scientific Method: "If my theory is true, than my prediction
will come true. My prediction came true, therefore my theory is true.
This is known as the Fallacy of Asserting the Consequent. In logic
textbooks it is noted as "If P, then Q. Q. Therefore, P."

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Received on Wed Jun 27 12:45:58 2007